IN K. CHAKRABORTY JAMES AND S. STRUMPER-KROBB (EDS) IMAGINING SPACE (BERLIN: PETER BERG, 2010), 177-88
TADHG O’KEEFFE
Time-space compression, ruination, and the ‘profound
otherness’ of Ground Zero
This paper is a set of reflections on architectural space and modernity,
inspired by that short passage of time between the September 11 attacks
on the World Trade Centre and the solemn, ritualistic, removal of the
final fragments of its architecture months later in advance of some
permanent memorialisation on the site. The first part of the paper is a
collection of archaeological readings of the site. These are, by their
nature, concerned with space and its imagination, since Archaeology as a
discipline is fundamentally both a temporal imagining of spatiality and a
spatial imagining of temporality; the concept of the imaginary is critical
to both definitions of Archaeology because the past is a dead place that
is accessible only through imaginative engagements with its remains,
and because Archaeology is a discipline of fictive accounts of that past.
The second part of the paper considers both the mnemonics of
architectural and corporeal space and, developing out of that, the
mirroring and remembering of the creation of ‘the West’ in the
‘profound otherness’ of the attacks.
Ground Zero as archaeological space
This paper began life in an e-mail exchange in 2005 with an American
colleague with respect to an article I was writing about Urban
Archaeology. I mentioned that I was considering finishing the paper with
some reference to the World Trade Centre and the events of 9/11. This
particular comment elicited a one-word response, ‘Why?’. From this side
of the Atlantic the answer, or answers, to the question seemed selfevident, but my colleague’s response seemed to me to capture the
enduring presence of this event in the American psyche. It was not yet
‘old enough’ to be archaeological, not because only four years had
elapsed but because it was so locked into the American present, not part
of a ‘then’ but part of the ‘now’.
There were five answers I could have given to the question, four of
which are as follows; the fifth answer closes this paper.
First, the attack impacted directly and devastatingly on
conventional archaeological assemblages.1 Huge collections of materials
from two important New York archaeological excavations were stored in
subterranaean rooms under Six World Trade Centre beside the North
Tower. Most of these materials were retrieved in excavations of the
nearby Five Points district, a place of immigrant settlement in lower
Manhattan in the nineteenth century in which there was a very high
concentration of Irish families. One million artefacts were stored, but
only eighteen survived because they had been moved elsewhere for an
exhibition. The other major collection came from the excavated African
burial ground, a cemetery of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century free
and enslaved Africans also in lower Manhattan but originally located
outside the boundary of New Amsterdam.2 Parts of this collection
actually survived the devastation of September 11.
Second, the World Trade Centre site itself with its ruined buildings
was actually no different in certain fundamental regards from many other
archaeological sites. It was a site of former occupation and a cemetery,
and both it (as a site) and the ‘spoil’ removed from it were systematically
screened for artefact and human remains, in some instances involving
the forensic data-collecting skills of archaeologists.3 As a site, it had
what archaeologists routinely call ‘site formation processes’, in this case
spectacular and devastating ones, beamed-live to a global audience. The
material from the site was itself instantly ‘musealised’,4 with the
1
See, for example, Ruth Hargraves (ed.), Cataclysm and Challenge: Impact of
September 11, 2001, on Our Nation's Cultural Heritage (New York: Heritage
Preservation, 2002).
2
Michael L. Blakey, ‘The New York African burial ground project: an
examination of enslaved lives, a construction of ancestral ties’, Transforming
Anthropology 7.1 (1998), 53-8.
3
Richard A. Gould, ‘WTC Archaeology: what we saw, what we learned, and
what we did about it’, The SAA Archaeological Record 2 (2002), 11-17.
4
For this concept see Peter Van Mensch, ‘Museology and management:
everyday objects retrieved being charged with the responsibility, as the
Smithsonian Museum’s travelling exhibition put it, for ‘bearing witness
to history’.5
Third, those debates which were ignited immediately in both
mainstream media and blog culture about the preservation of the site and
about the salvaging and long-term futures of materials retrieved from it
(including human remains) raised familiar questions about efficacy and
morality in the curation of archaeological heritages. It is pertinent to
recall here that African burial ground material which was housed in the
World Trade Centre. The cemetery in question became a site of major
cultural contestation when it was discovered in 1991, as New York’s
Black descendant community successfully protested its right to be
consulted on an archaeology that it identified as its own cultural
possession. African-American archaeologists were subsequently charged
with the task of excavating the remains.6
Fourth, the ruination of buildings, followed by their rapid
replacement, is a common trope in urban America, with a history
extending back into the nineteenth century,7 but if ‘the chance for things
to age and to become ruin has diminished in the age of turbo capitalism’,
as Huyssen has asserted,8 so too has diminished the capacity of ruins to
attract specific meanings to themselves. The retention of the ruins of the
World Trade Centre towers uniquely allowed meanings to accrete
around them, and so allowed archaeological observations of the
incorporation and enactment of those meanings. Specifically, close
observation of the performance of culture around the smouldering ruins
and amidst the vapour of hundreds of irretrievably lost friends offered a
unique if poignant opportunity for archaeological reflection on the
enemies or friends? Current tendencies in theoretical museology and museum
management in Europe’, in Eiji Mizushima (ed.), Museum Management in the
21st Century (Tokyo: Museum Management Academy, 2004), 3-19.
5
http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/, consulted 8 March 2010.
6
Terrance W. Epperson, ‘The politics of “race” and cultural identity at the
African Burial Ground excavations, New York City’, World Archaeological
Bulletin 7 (1997), 108-11.
7
Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins. An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity,
1819–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
8
Andreas Huyssen, ‘Nostalgia for ruins’, Grey Room 23 (2006), 20.
performative aspects of the Smithsonian concept of ‘bearing witness to
history’. The passage of time between the destruction of the towers and
the final removal of their fragments can be equated with what Kevin
Hetherington has described as ‘the space where things are held in a state
of denying their wastage – where they are held at our disposal for a
second time so that we can attain a settlement with their remaining
value’.9 One issue that struck me with respect to this concept of
‘remaining value’ was how, for the relatives of those whose bodies were
never recovered, the fragments of the destroyed buildings ‘became’
those lost bodies, even to the point of being contained by mourning
families within the types of vessel or container normally used for the
ashes of the cremated dead. This very concept of trans-substantiation
may explain many features of the ancient archaeological record – socalled votive deposits, for example – and here was an example in a
contemporary context. Indeed, the trans-substantiating principle
informed many of the proposals for the post-911 redesign of the site,
with proposed projects referring to the ‘footprints’ of the towers and
even to the ‘embodiment’ of memories in such footprints.10 For example,
in Brian Strawn and Karla Sierralta’s proposal for a memorial, called
Dual Memory in explicit homage to the pair of towers, ‘the memory of
an individual and the combined memory of the community as a whole
are embodied by [sic] the footprints of the former World Trade Center
Towers and the new future for the area…. The footprints serve as
healing points for our great losses’ [emphasis added].11 The transsubstantive link between the buildings and bodies in New York bring to
mind the fate of the house in Soham, England, where two young girls
were murdered in 2002 by the local school caretaker: the house was
encased in hoarding to conceal it from view, and once the investigation
into the murders was completed and the caretaker tried in court, the
house was demolished behind the hoarding and its remains were taken
Kevin Hetherington, ‘Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal, and absent
presence’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004), 170.
10
Maarten A. Hajer, ‘Rebuilding Ground Zero. The politics of performance’,
Planning Theory & Practice 6.4 (2005), 452.
11
www.wtcsitememorial.org/fin4.html, consulted 8 March 2010.
9
away to be crushed and deposited in undisclosed locations.12 While the
victims of the New York attacks were corporealised in the architecture
of the World Trade Centre, the Sohom house was enfolded in the
popular imagination into the evil of the two murders and was treated
accordingly.
‘Profound otherness’ in the age of turbo-capitalism
In 2001 the World Monuments Watch, a non-profit heritage organisation
based in New York, added the recently-created Ground Zero to its global
list of 100 sites that it regarded as needing protection.13 It was included
as one of ‘our landmarks’, alongside Mostar Bridge and the Bamiyan
buddhas, that ‘have become prized targets for terrorists because they are
what defines the cultures, ideals and achievements of the people who
created them, who use them, who live with them’.14 The description of
these places and sites as ‘our landmarks’ captures with an economy of
words the Western heritage industry’s belief in a core heritage that
belongs to all the world, a heritage over which the rights of ‘owners’ at
any one time – the Taliban in the Bamiyan case, for example – cannot
trump humanity’s rights of ownership. The notion of a ‘global heritage’
worthy of protection against alienation or destruction by any power at
any time is so entirely naturalized in ‘the West’ that we easily forget that
it is entirely a cultural construction of ‘the West’, itself a constructed
place. Indeed, while the unified concept of a ‘global heritage’ is a
12
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cambridgeshire/3595801.stm,
consulted 8 March 2010.
13
Joseph Nevins, ‘The abuse of memorialized space and the redefinition of
Ground Zero’, Journal of Human Rights 4.2 (2005), 267-82, for a critique of the
term ‘Ground Zero’.
14
Marilyn Perry and Bonnie Burnham, ‘A critical mission: the World
Monuments Watch’, in World Monuments Watch: 100 Most Endangered Sites
(New York: World Monuments Fund, 2001), 3; see also ‘Lynn Meskell,
‘Negative heritage and past mastering in Archaeology’, Anthropological
Quarterly 75.3 (2002), 557; Jonathan Golden, ‘Targeting heritage: the abuse of
symbolic sites in modern conflicts’, in Yorke Rowan and Uzi Baram (eds),
Marketing Heritage. Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past (Walnut
Creek: AltaMira Press), 189.
relatively recent product of Western thinking, its informing concepts –
one fundamentally spatial (‘global’), one fundamentally temporal
(‘heritage’), but both of them embracing more than simply space and
time – are arguably among the defining concepts of ‘the West’.15
Although the term ‘landmark’, connoting something present in the
landscape, seems a rather inappropriate term in the context of downtown
New York, the World Monuments Watch’s attention to things and places
which were destroyed, or at least rendered into fragments, on 11
September 2001 was perhaps not surprising, given the status which sites
of violent climax and dénouement are sometimes afforded in this
Western heritage-culture. Little Big Horn and the Somme poppy-fields,
to name but two, are sanctified not because of what is there today but
because of what happened there in the past, as if history remains trapped
in the still air above the ever-changing vegetation. When ruins created by
such events also survive, as they did at the World Trade Centre for some
months after the attacks, those ruins draw some of that sanctity onto
themselves, not as mere memorials to what was lost but as final living
embodiments of what is otherwise lost. As a place of the utmost and
most instant historical significance, the ruined World Trade Centre, with
its mangled steel skeleton draped in debris mounds, thus became very
quickly one of the most visited ‘sites’ in the United States. But, unlike
with many sites perceived to be of exceptional heritage value, its visitors
were not allowed any physical contact with fabric, but were
accommodated instead on a viewing platform designed by prominent
New York architects.16 This particular gesture of musealisation or
‘gallerisation’ of the fragments heightened the sense of their exceptional
importance, and provides some confirmation of Karl Heinz
Stockhausen’s provocative appraisal of the site and its creation in an
interview in Die Welt, 19 September 2001, as ‘the greatest artwork ever’
[my translation].
Although misquoted – he actually said that he regarded it as
Lucifer’s greatest art-work – Stockhausen’s comments were greeted with
Terje Brattli, ‘Managing the Archaeological World Cultural Heritage:
consensus or rhetoric?’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 42.1 (2009), 24-39.
16
Debbie Lisle, ‘Gazing at Ground Zero: tourism, voyeurism and spectacle’,
Journal for Cultural Research 8.1 (2004), 3-21.
15
revulsion from some academics.17 Public opposition to any intellectual
or academic meditation on the attacks was not, according to Derek
Sayer, ‘evidence of sentiment clouding reason so much as a refusal to
efface a profound otherness by assimilating it to the categories of our
comprehension’ [emphasis added].18 Viewed through this lens,
Stockhausen’s take on the attack can be understood as a response from
outside the normative boundaries.
The concept of ‘profound otherness’ to which Sayer draws attention
is worth exploring. On a superficial level it might be attached solely to
the act of violence, to the mass-murder, itself. But I wonder if a sense of
‘profound otherness’ in September 2001 also attached to, and maybe
emanated in part from, both the architecture of the twin towers before
their destruction and the short period of time in which they were ruined.
Regarding their architecture, the twin towers did not ‘work’ according to
the same aesthetic principles as other items of monumental architecture
on the New York skyline. Yes, like other ‘modern’ New York buildings
of the post-war period they made no concession to a visual-cultural
historicism; they simply and transparently celebrated their own
materiality: constructions of steel and glass without retro-fittings, except
for the widely criticized Gothic details, which were never actually
visible from a distance. But, unlike those other comparable
contemporary buildings, they self-indulgently celebrated that materiality
by reflecting each other, to each other. They always looked intrusive on
the New York skyline, not because of their sheer size but because they
engaged in a shiny-surfaced dialogue with each other, not with the city.
They ‘othered’ themselves within New York. The twin towers were also,
in a sense, further ‘othered’ by virtue of their ruination: in other words,
17
For the fact that he was actually misquoted see W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do
Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004), 19. For the reaction see, for example, Valentin Nussbaum, ‘Serial
Künstler: portrait of the artist as a malefactor’, in Catriona MacLeod, Véronique
Plesch and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (eds), Elective Affinities: Testing Word and
Image Relationships (Amsterdam, New York: Editions Rodopi B. V., 2009),
208.
18
Derek Sayer, ‘Wittgenstein at Ground Zero’, Space & Culture 11.1 (2008),
12.
as ruins, or dislocated sedimenta in the commercial heart of an American
city, they possessed an ‘otherness’. 19
Ground Zero and the birth of Western modernity
The World Trade Centre entered the World Monuments Watch’s list at
number 101. The organisation may have felt it unfair to remove some
other worthy monument or site to make room for it, especially given the
circumstances of its creation, but its placement, not so much as an
extension to the Top 100 but on an elevation above it, a site primus inter
pares, was as overt a political act as the global heritage industry as ever
seen. The point is made clear by the Bushian rhetorical cadence to the
language adopted, needlessly, by the World Monuments Watch to justify
its inclusion of Ground Zero. Conservative American polity successfully
sucked the smouldering ruins of the World Trade Centre into an entirely
unnuanced discourse about identity and power and value-system, and
thus the term ‘terrorist’ entered – was forced into? – everyday-speak as a
metonym, not just in a traumatised New York but across the nation, for
those who ‘hate our freedom’; it is useful to note here that, at the same
time and by the same token, ‘homeland’, a rarely used noun that was not
part of the ‘traditional arsenal of patriotic idioms’, acquired a new
potency and came to represent a particular set of values rather than an
actual place.20 Nor was the World Monuments Watch alone among
heritage agencies in adopting a political position. The Museum of the
City of New York, wherein assorted World Trade Centre memorials
were collected, identified ‘the role of museums as stewards of the
nation’s stories and as special places where communities can examine
and reaffirm our basic freedoms’.21 It does seem ironic, though, that the
World Monuments Watch’s very phrasing seems to allow the ‘terrorist’ a
Stephen Barker, ‘Strata/sedimenta/lamina: in ruin(s)’, Derrida Today 5
(2008), 48-9.
20
Amy Kaplan, ‘Homeland insecurities: some reflections on language and
space’, Radical History Review 85 (2003), 85.
21
Ekaterina V. Haskins, and Justin P. de Rose, ‘Memory, visibility, and public
space: reflections on commemoration(s) of 9/11’, Space & Culture 6.4 (2003),
384.
19
casting vote in what defines a people’s culture. The World Trade Centre
is on the list not because it had intrinsic ‘monument’ value when it stood
but because of Al-Qaeda’s evaluation of its significance and how that led
to its destruction. The irony is eradicated if, following Julian Reid’s
argument, we ‘understand Al-Qaeda not as a force born outside Western
control and civilization but, in opposition to that reading, as very much a
product of the development of Western modernity’.22
The World Trade Centre was a complex of buildings containing
the corporate offices of major players in different branches of the globalfinancial sector. The World Monuments Watch’s assertion that it
represented culture rather than ideology – the ideology of global
capitalism, of money-making – was thus highly questionable, even
before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, but it was one articulation
among many of a point-of-view that allowed the attack be cast primarily
as an attack on ‘ordinary Americans’ and their values, as if the World
Trade Centre and the Pentagon (and, in the case of American Airlines
Flight 93, the White House?) were merely architectural containers,
ontologically-neutral bodies, the activities within which were incidental
to the carnage. This was most assuredly not the case. It is self-evident
that the sheer scale of the New York complex made it an attractive target
and an imposing ruin:
The weight of symbolic value that Al-Qaeda derived from its attack on the World
Trade Center was, it can be argued, a product of the extent to which the vertical
and orthogonal form of those particular buildings had become incongruous with
the newfound fluidity and dynamism of more contemporary Western forms 23
In the aftermath of the attacks, a traumatised nation had neither the
energy nor the inclination to separate the cultural from the ideological,
nor, as we have seen, to distinguish the irretrievably-lost bodies of the
architecture from the lost human bodies within that architecture.
‘Ground Zero’ is a term that was first coined with respect to the
sites of nuclear detonation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it connotes,
Julian Reid, ‘Architecture, Al-Qaeda, and the World Trade Center: rethinking
relations between war, modernity, and city spaces after 9/11’, Space & Culture
7.4 (2004), 396.
23
Reid, ‘Architecture, Al-Qaeda, and the World Trade Center,’ 399.
22
literally, a starting-point in both time and space.24 The immediate
attachment of that term to the World Trade Centre in September 2001
went uncontested, as if the American nation understood instinctively that
time and space were being recalibrated in the existential trauma of
seeing buildings fold in on themselves in an instantaneous and
apocalyptic time-space compression. And their instincts were generally
right. We are, after all, in a world that all western cultural commentators
describe as ‘post-9/11’. But that idea of a recalibration of time and space
effected by the violent visiting of the ‘other’ – a ‘profoundly’ different
‘other’ on September 2001 – and by the consequent creation of ruins,
suggests to me that we might connect post-9/11 America with post-1492
America, identifying the ‘West’ as an earlier recalibrated space, and
identifying ‘modernity’ as an earlier concept of recalibrated time. To
elaborate, I will simply quote from an earlier work:
However ‘modernity’ is defined in its entirety, most scholars across the disciplines
would probably agree, first, that early modernity is constituted by the convergence
of intellectual-scientific revolutions (heliocentrism, humanism and cartesianism
among them) within the politico-economic context of capitalism, and second, that
it is the condition of the seventeenth-century North Atlantic world (later, ‘the
West’), becoming so in the sixteenth century. While the rupturing of ‘the
medieval’ and the birth of modernity are understood to be related, sequential,
phenomena in northern and western Europe, few have connected the sequence to
the discovery of the New World, as Couze Venn has observed (2000, 109-11). Yet
the connection is incontrovertible. The indigenous, hitherto unknown (to
Europeans), populations of the Americas constituted a collective ‘Other’ against
which Europeans reimagined themselves, thus sundering themselves from their
medieval self-perceptions and creating the environment in which ideas of ‘self’
were later to emerge. Also, the discovery of people who were not a part of
European history altered the European sense of historicity itself, as Robert
Koselleck asserted (1985), alerting Europeans to hitherto unnoticed temporal
discontinuities. Although rooted in medieval beliefs about the morality of killing
non-Christians, the violence that accompanied the finding of the Americas by the
Spanish, Portuguese, French and English can be understood now as a powerful
metaphor for that medieval-modern rupture, driven as it was by a new,
recognisably capitalist, ideology of ownership within the context of a new global
spatiality.25
Kaplan, ‘Homeland insecurities,’ 83.
Tadhg O’Keeffe and Sinéad Quirke, ‘A house at the birth of modernity:
Ightermurragh castle in context’, in James Lyttleton and Colin Rynne (eds.),
24
25
I want to return to my colleague’s question with respect to including the
World Trade Centre in a paper on Urban Archaeology: why? The final
answer of the five addresses the future. Michel-Rolph Trouillot has
discussed the historical role of the ‘Western’ discipline of Anthropology
in the creation of the concept of ‘the savage’, offering material for an
argument that the discipline has been complicit, through its legitimising
of ‘otherness’, in the creation and sustaining of global inequality in the
modern world.26 Archaeology, as the anthropological study of the past,
must be equally complicit according to the same arguments, and many
archaeologists working on global-heritage issues recognise this: “global
world heritage could be perceived by some as an extension of the
colonial project, traveling to, knowing and mapping territories outside
one's own national boundaries’.27 It is inconceivable, I think, that the
World Trade Centre attacks and the wars that have followed them will
have no impact on the archaeological study of the modern, global, world,
not so much in terms of freedom of movement but in terms of moral
responsibility.
Plantation Ireland. Settlement and Material Culture, c.1550 – c.1700 (Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 2009), 111.
26
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations. Anthropology and the
Modern World (Basingstoke: Pallgrave Macmillian, 2003).
27
Meskell, ‘Negative heritage and past mastering in Archaeology’, 568.